


Salt Rock Children

by Sermna



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-14
Updated: 2013-04-14
Packaged: 2017-12-08 10:37:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/760407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sermna/pseuds/Sermna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red ringed child, bitten to the core, taken to the doctor and victim of plague- so was Rose Lalonde.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt Rock Children

**Author's Note:**

> To Andrea, who planted the seed.

 

 

On September 15th, the security cameras at a convenience store by the name of Barringer’s all malfunctioned. The owner, baffled by the melted wires and cracked lenses, had more ordered and thought about how expensive such tiny cameras could be. The last thing any of them had ever recorded was a small girl, perhaps 13, entering the store.

Were you to ask, the cashier who rang up the girl’s purchase would tell you there was something a little off about her. “Nothing much,” she would say, “just something about the eyes. She was too young to have those eyes.” The girl had purchased a candy bar and a bottle of water. A sharp observer might have noticed the bulge in her jacket pocket that was not present when she entered, but she was not stopped, and the girl exited the store with several packets of low dose 81mg Aspirin.

On September 14th, a bookstore by the name of Scratch & English burned to the ground. The cause was determined to be a faulty space heater. No remains were found inside the building, and the owner could not be reached. The windows, shattered by the heat, were boarded, and the city flowed around it in indifference. No sign of the hidden rooms beneath the ruined floors were ever found, not even when the building was bought and refurbished into a sandwich shop. They would lay undisturbed forever.

The vast fortune of one Dr. B. Scratch would, after his failure to resurface, and with the lack of any kind of will, come to be taken by the state. It helped to fund a very nice new Elementary School in a small rural town. Papers were written and filed, and eventually Dr. B. Scratch was legally declared deceased. No one was quite sure of his fate.

In later years, the sandwich shop would be declared haunted due to an incident wherein a total of seven customers witnessed the sudden appearance of anywhere from 3 to 20 “shadow tentacles.” Witness accounts varied widely, and one woman even claimed to hear “water and whispering voices.” It was all very neatly explained by an expert, who used electromagnetic equipment to prove that the shop happened to lie on a very special magnetic pocket, which might cause certain phenomena, etc. etc. The shop has since enjoyed a great influx of business.

In New York, a certain missing child flier yellowed with age, just as did the woman who put them up. Entombed in her large house, Ms. Roxy Lalonde was eventually found dead of alcohol poisoning. Her will, oddly, stated that her entire fortune be given to one “Dirk Strudel & son” (sic.)

Her child was, in the eyes of the state, never located.

At the center of all these things was a girl named Rose Lalonde.

 

* * *

She began to feel it again. It was slight at first, just a taste of salt at the back of her throat, just something hard inside her skin. Dizziness. Waves. She threw her paperback novel onto the tiled floor and heaved into the bathtub again. With a stab of old relief, she saw that it was just vomit- stomach acid, partially digested food, disgusting and burning in her nose, utterly commonplace. She wiped at her mouth and straightened back up.

From the high-set window she could see that a storm was gathering, the fourth one in four days, and for a minute the thought of water terrified her, that water that came from the ocean and collected in the skies. Unholy thing, water was, home to _other_ things, vast and horrible-

But none of that had control over her anymore. She was free.

She picked up the novel again and smoothed out the crumpled pages. It was a juvenile favorite, a guilty pleasure, so to speak. _Wuthering Heights_. She was almost finished, stretched flat on the denouement, where Heathcliff lie dead on Catherine’s bed under the torrents of rain, the same kind as hit the bathroom window, the same kind as came down while the small ghostly Catherine asked to be _let in, please-_

The vomit came again.

* * *

Knox, Richard. Telephone Interview. 20 January 2015.

 

STUDENT: So, Mr. Knox, how long have you owned the Kriller Sandwich Shop?

KNOX: Ah, I’d say around five years. My buddy, he opened it up late 2009, but he sold it to me not a year later. I don’t guess he knew what he was really getting into. He was a funny guy.

STUDENT: What do you mean by that, sir?  
KNOX: Talked about hearing things a lot. Scraping and whatnot. Said there were things beneath the floor, right? Funny guy. Sold it to me real cheap.

STUDENT: I see. Have you had any experiences like that?

KNOX: Me? Nah. You say you were writing a paper over that supernatural crap back in ‘11? Listen, I think nothing like that happened. My assistant was running things that day, and she’s a bit flighty, if you know what I mean.

STUDENT: But sir, the seven witnesses-

KNOX: Bolts loose, all of them. No offense, son, I know you’re just writing a paper. I don’t regret the business all of this has brought me, either. It does make a good story- black tentacles coming out of the walls. Real nice. Like a horror movie, you know?

STUDENT: Yes, sir. Ah, what can you tell me about the place’s history?

 

* * *

Rose was in college, majoring in psychology- she had dreams of securing some kind of job in the field- and her foster family quite supported her in it. She’d lived with them close to six years, since she was thirteen, and had come to not only trust them, but also to like them. The first year had been rough- it was, after all, very hard to hide the fact that she spent almost every night in the bathroom. It took months to flush everything out of her system. One time she had set the plug in the bathtub, and over a single night she filled it to the brim with salt water.

Saltwater and ichor.

She’d been a bitter hard child, with red-ringed eyes and bitten fingers, and something about her eyes said _danger_ , but this had been seen before by the foster family- salt rock children, hole-riddled children, children with burns for eyes and something dark and palpable living inside of them. Children of the streets, they were, but not Rose. Not Rose.

Rose was a writer and a thinker, but not a dreamer in any sense: Rose did what needed to be done. If asked, she said nothing of the time before her life with her foster family, but that was not unusual. Many kids did not. She excelled in school and graduated with honors. Her friends would remember her as crisp, ironic, funny.

Rose Lalonde.

At home, face flush against her cool bathroom mirror, she did not feel crisp. She did not feel funny. All she felt was the ghost of old terror, the salt-dirt taste of horror to the bones, all the crushing weight of the past without any of the triumph or power. She felt the Rose of thirteen years, who struck the match; the Rose of ten, who stole her first book, the one that had hummed under her fingers and promised _things_ ; the Rose of five, who dreamed of water night after night and who had no name for what was Unknown. She was Rose of nineteen, and with despair she found that she had never really grown past thirteen. Never really left the presence of Scratch.

Oh, Scratch. Withered with age and yet somehow blank, the half of the Scratch & English hole, with straight-knuckled fingers and a tic in his voice that made one think him to know everything. Scratch who took her by the hand and showed her _knowledge_ , and then strapped her down and used her as a messenger. _Seer Rose_ , he called her. _Little One_.

She thought of him even now.

She could feel it though- the shifting of something. As if she had found shelter for the night that lasted almost six years, and was just now seeing the crack of dawn under the door. Something stirred, just as something had stirred briefly a few years ago- oh, she had heard about it. But she didn’t have to. Because that night she had served host once again to the many hundred thousand children of _them_. She could never feel clean.

Could never be lost, oh no.

No good messenger could ever be.

As distant as the stars, the storm broke.

 

* * *

 Before, she’d lived on ink just as a plant might live in water. And she had books, stolen and scoured for and even some that came from no discernable source. They came one after another, some hummed to her, others sang, and still others lie as silent as she was herself. She came to love them, came to know the distinctive feel of each of them, and slowly she learned the language of the magic that could not, and yet had to be, real.

She flowered under this instruction. Her fingers, so small and childlike, became long and deft and rimmed with sores, where she bit and peeled and rubbed them raw on pages. Her hair grew into her eyes, and her legs became long, and if one were to look closely they would find that everyday her violet eyes bleached out a little more, as if something were taking everything dark from her appearance and collecting it inside.

At home her mother saw nothing, suspected nothing, or, if she did (and Rose rather thought she did), said nothing. Rose did not have the internet. Rose did not write. Instead, she learned the books, and dreamed her dreams, and began to taste the salt in her mouth. She felt the stirrings under the ground of bones, and at night she felt the fine hair on her arms shift with the moon’s orbit. She thought on all of this with a certain disappointment- was she a witch of life? Must she know all the workings of the Earth, must she dream of the water? And yet she knew how to bring the bones out of the Earth, how to stare at the moon and feel its chalk-powder surface, how to divine the secrets of the depths of any ocean.

She was made up of equal parts light and dark, just as the sun creates shadows on a lattice, patches and lines and holes that she could never be sure of. If she were looking at the world through tinted glass, she once wondered, would she know? No.

Rose Lalonde came to know thirteen years when Scratch came for her.

 

* * *

Brennan, Jude. Telephone Interview. 21 January 2015.

 

STUDENT: Good afternoon, Mrs. Brennan. Are you ready for the interview?

BRENNAN: Ah, hello. I am.

STUDENT: You can start whenever you like.

BRENNAN: Thank you. It’s been several years, but I don’t think I can ever forget that day. Mr. Knox was out, so I was in charge of the restaurant. It was a slow day, only a few customers, so the staff and I didn’t have much to do. Everything was fine until 5pm, when Casey, the cook, kept telling me she heard whispering coming from somewhere near the ground-

 

* * *

Dr. Scratch. How he found her, knew of her, it didn’t matter- it only mattered that he did, that he knew everything her young eyes knew. Dr. Scratch, of indeterminate age, of indeterminate origin, a man of manners and of wonder- although, in the perfect clarity of hindsight, Rose knew him to be ingrown, for all his years still  as petulant as a child. At the time, she saw in him the obscuring haze of youthful trust, and secretly believed him to be a wizard- what else could he be? She believed this until the end.

He took her with chloroform.

 

* * *

STUDENT: And what did you think about it?

BRENNAN: I thought there might be some kind of gas leak, making a whistling noise. I told her to let me know if she smelled anything, so we could clear the place out, you know, and then I was going to call someone to come take a look at it.

STUDENT: Did you make the call?

BRENNAN: No. I left the kitchen, and that’s when it happened.

STUDENT: Can you describe it to me?

BRENNAN: It... it was as if we were suddenly plunged underwater. I couldn’t hear anything, like there was water in my ears. I can’t even describe it, I know I sound crazy, but I felt as if everything were a million years old. Like I had always been there. And then I saw them, long and slimy and-

 

* * *

He chained her to the wall. There was slack, she found, a small puddle of chain that was almost too heavy to move. With every step the grating of the chain grew quieter and quieter, until at last it hung suspended behind her, and she looked down to her feet, expected to see her old shoes. With something approaching horror, she saw that she had been redressed. Her hair was trimmed away from her eyes, and a new headband dug into her temples. She had even been washed.

In a moment, her admiration of Scratch shattered and fell into grimy terror.

She shrieked, a hissing mix of outrage and terror, and with a distant sense of wrongness she felt a power welling up within her. Words like oil flicked off her tongue, _mg’nflai fhtahn **WHAFH’MGNLUI**_ **,** and her fingers found purchase on the hard iron at her wrists, but they would not break, not even with the strength of the blackness that welled up from within her. Trickles of magic, like ants, crawled at her fingernails and animated her body in jerks and spasms that carried her forward, against and against the chain, and still the door remained maddeningly out of reach. She shrieked again and became choked by the ichor that bubbled up from somewhere deep and forgotten.

_They come, Seer,_ came the voice through the door. _Listen to them. Hear them. Touch them, Little One, feel them inside you-_

Rose Lalonde, thirteen, who believed she knew the world and controlled it, was broken under the Unknown that raged war inside her.

 

* * *

STUDENT: What do you think caused it? Do you believe the story about the magnetic field?

BRENNAN: Of course not. I can’t tell you what it was, but I could tell you what caused it. There’s something evil in the building. Something- something.

STUDENT: Evil, ma’am?

BRENNAN: I don’t... I don’t know.

 

* * *

She counted the days in the way nature sometimes does, the way oysters know to fan open their shells when the tide fails to inform them. She felt the distant tug of the moon. And just as the oyster will sometimes reveal a pearl, tiny and unformed, Rose showed her very own passenger.

The messages came from her.

She didn’t notice them at first, not while she was still reeling in the horror of a fresh wave of salt, gallons of water that threatened to choke her, impossible amounts that seemed to come from nowhere. Once, once she had wondered what one would find were they to cut her open.

_Eggs_ , came the answer. _Eggs._

And so it was- they came up with the water, tiny pearly things, in globules like the eggs of a frog, or an octopus. That was not quite the worst part. The worst part was watching Scratch collect them in his old hands, watching them throb while he held them close to his ear. She never wanted to know what he heard. When she was done, when all that would come from her came from her, he’d look up and smile a little, a happy smile, a smile that said _well done._ She hated it, hated it with all the new energy afforded her, and she shrieked at him. Again and again, reached for her hair and pulled it out in moon-white tufts, felt her feet in the ground and beckoned to the earth to _swallow him whole, swallow him swallow him swallow him_ , but no such power did she have over him, not Scratch, not the caretaker, not the host.

He swallowed her eggs.

 

* * *

With shaking hands, Rose of nineteen set up the camera. It was a webcam, a cheap one, clipped primly to her computer. It would work okay for what she wanted. When she was sure the angle was right, and that it was recording, she sat on the floor where she would be in the center of the shot.

_Aaaaand, action, Rosie_. It wasn’t funny.

How long she sat there, she didn’t know. As the years had gone, she’d lost her sway over the natural world. Had stopped seeing, so to speak. The moon had nothing to say to her. The earth was as silent as ever.

And she waited.

 

* * *

One day, when the moon held high over her, Scratch brought her two wooden knitting needles and ball of twisted lilac yarn.

_A gift. You’ve been so good._

It was her practice to only stare at him, to let the Unknown peer through her eyes and pin him to the wall. For once, it seemed to bother him. He set the knitting things on the cot where she slept. _I know you must be bored to tears, and I am, above all, an excellent-_

_Host,_ she’d finished for him. It was something he said often, a phrase that grated on her until nothing was left but rubbed-red skin, but today the whispers in her throat told her a funny story. _Host host host. Excellent indeed_. And she laughed at him. Laughed until it hurt, laughed until the double voices that lived in her throat joined her, and the loose pebbles on the floor floated up to rest at eye level. Scratch only stared at her, demon spawn, salt rock child, puppet and burnt asphalt and crushed tin foil Rose, stared as if she were a scorpion that had only just learned of her stinger. She laughed as all of these things.

_Oh, get thee behind me!_ She mocked. _Don’t you know what you make, oh father? Don’t you?_

_I’ll take away your gifts, child-_

But Rose of thirteen was not one for threats. Vaguely aware that the black dripped onto her skirt ( _picked out for her, oh yes, Scratch liked his girls, liked them dolled up-_ ) she picked up one needle, and then the other, and brought them to her eyes.

_You call me a Seer._

_Put those down._

_What can I see through two wooden rods? Would you have me blind? Your Blind Prophet?_

_I told you to put them down!_

_Ah, but they are a gift! And I shall do with them what I please. Do you know what would please me, oh father? It would please me to see these in your brain._

_Then I am afraid you will be bitterly disappointed, child._

But she was not _._

 

* * *

The chain, in the end, was no matter.

It had been months that she knew confinement, and in the time her bonds had become her friends- she knew them as thoroughly as they knew her. And there was, of course, the help of her Other Friends.

Oh, how she knew them.

_Whisper whisper whisper_ , they did, told her _SECRETS and STORIES and PROPHECIES, told her WEAKNESSES and EVERYTHING THAT THAT DIRTY MAN KNEW KNEW KNEW_.

Rose Lalonde was Rose no longer, but the Seer.

The Seer shattered the chain.

She need not walk, nor need she open the door. She thought these things, and they happened- the tendrils of the magic were back, made steel by the Others, those things that chittered and shrieked under the briny black depths. Hers. The magic moved her forward, like a clay doll made to move on camera. If a mirror were in front of her, she’d be swallowed by her eyes- black, black, black. Burnt out liquid holes.

She could feel Scratch above her, through the wooden slats, and she sent her ghosts through the cracks of the floor. Her black lattice tentacles. They found his feet, rooted him there, and she came for him.

She really was not disappointed.

 

* * *

She threw up everything. Everything that welled up in her, everything that had waited in her for those six years, everything that grew and thrived and that she thought was gone. It spilled onto the wooden floor and spread in preternatural intelligence. And still it came.

_Fool Rose! You thought you could escape!_

And so she had, but everything had been so quiet, so so quiet, how could she have known?

_They don’t leave their kind, don’t leave their messengers! Not you, Rose, not you not you not you_.

The very first tentacle slid up her throat, choking her.

 

* * *

She found matches behind the counter. No one was in the shop, not that she’d bother to check, and the street through the huge window was empty.

The books burned wonderfully.

 

* * *

Rose Lalonde, 19, was reported missing by her foster family after she failed to make any sort of contact for an entire month. A search of her apartment revealed that she had likely not lived in the apartment for three weeks, as all the food was spoiled and her cat was found in poor health. There were no signs of foul play, though in the bedroom the wooden floor had been warped and coated in a salt film, as if a large amount of salt water had flooded the room. So far, no one has any theories as to why that may have occurred. Furthermore, a small webcam was found filming one corner of the room. A search of her computer has found only one short, heavily distorted clip, in which Lalonde can be seen sitting on the floor, vomiting some sort of dark substance. In the bathroom the bathtub was found plugged and filled with dried vomit. A copy of Wuthering Heights was found on the floor, open to the last page. The investigation is underway.

 

* * *

 

 

****  
****

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> “I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.”  
> -Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights


End file.
